27 février

Theodosius ordered every people under his rule to hold the Nicene faith and branded the rest heretics. From persecuted sect to the state’s religion had taken under eighty years.

In his maiden speech in the Lords, Byron opposed the bill making frame-breaking a hanging offence: “Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows?” The bill passed anyway.

The tsar had suspended the Duma the night before. Its members met anyway, informally, in the Tauride Palace, and chose a committee under the chairman Mikhail Rodzianko to restore order: the seed of the Provisional Government.

At dawn, about 06:00 local time, the same training detachment refused to march out. Led by Sergeant Timofei Kirpichnikov, the men shot their captain and went from barracks to barracks calling out other regiments. By nightfall most of the garrison had joined; they opened the prisons and took the…

No one may be elected president more than twice, nor more than once after serving over two years of someone else’s term. It exempted Truman, the sitting president; he did not run in 1952.

In 1974 Paul Berg and colleagues had asked labs to pause the riskiest gene-splicing experiments. At Asilomar about 140 biologists, lawyers and journalists agreed on rules instead: containment to match the risk, and crippled bacteria that could not live outside the lab. The NIH guidelines of 1976…

The first Winter Games out of step with the Summer ones, only two years after Albertville. Norwegians lined the cross-country trails in the snow in their tens of thousands, and Norway topped the medal table at home.

Satoshi Tajiri, who had collected insects as a boy in suburban Tokyo, built the Game Boy game around the link cable: no one could catch all 151 creatures without trading with a friend. Released in Japan six years into the Game Boy’s life, it revived the machine and grew into the highest-grossing…